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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

They actually are quite similar words

Only in that they both end with "oz" and sound nothing alike, don't share any common meaning, and have no other obvious connection. Personally, I don't see how anybody could ever confuse those two words.

Don't forget, trademark law is such that you have to protect your trademark or you lose it. If there's any risk at all of infringement, you have to go after it.

"any" risk? OK, great, there is a slight, however improbable, risk that somebody could confuse "Fogbeam" and "Moz". After all, we both do something related to computers and both words do contain an "o". So maybe Moz should attack us next?

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Right, because everybody has perfect memory of everything they've heard in the past. No wait, it's actually quite the opposite. People have crappy memory, especially for things they're not already familiar with. Neither word has any meaning to an English speaker, but they sounds very similar. I can easily imagine how someone might get confused.

If someone else launched a company "Fogdeam", which sold similar software to yours, surely you'd go after them.

If someone else launched a company "Fogdeam", which sold similar software to yours, surely you'd go after them.

I don't know for sure that we would. But I'd argue that, being a longer word, you get more confusion with the one character change, since any one character changes a smaller percentage of the overall word.

The position of the character definitely matters to. For example, in your "fogdeam" case, I'd say it's iffy. But if somebody launched Dogbeam, I doubt the thought of going after them would even enter my mind. This is all, of course, assuming that they didn't also use a similar logo and similar messaging, etc.

Out of curiousity, what if they did the same thing as you, or a very similar thing? If you serve scientists with lasers (how Austin Powers of you), and they serve scientists with lasers, what would you do?

Ya know, it's hard to say without actually being in that exact situation. I won't say we would never invoke trademark law, but I will just say that - in general - I don't agree with trying to treat trademarks as overly broad.

Maybe the "Moz" / "Doz" one is a little bit more of a grey area than I see it, I don't know... I'm biased towards a certain mindset here.

I'd worry about making my fogbeam product better then fogdeam's. If it has to eat fog and shoot laser beam, that's what I'd do.

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